The Tao of Anarchy: There is no God. There is no State. They are all superstitions that are established by the power-hunger psychopaths to divide, rule, and enslave us. It's only you and me, we are all true and real existence though in one short life. That is, We all are capable to freely interact with one another without coercion from anyone. We all are capable to take self-responsibility to find ways to live with one another in liberty, equality, harmony, and happiness before leaving this world forever. We all were born free and equal among all beings on this planet. We are not imprisoned in and by a place with a political name just because we were born there by chance. We are not chained to a set of indoctrinated beliefs that have been imposed upon us by so-called traditions. This Planet is home to all of us. No one owns it. We share the benefits from and responsibility to this Earth. We pledge no oath, no allegiance to no one; submit to no authority. We are all free and equal. The only obligation we all must undertake constantly with consistency is to respect the same freedoms and rights of others.

The Conflicting Forces of Modernism: Kafka and Kierkegaard

Sunday, December 09, 2018

We
seem to be heading into a confrontation between the two forces of
Modernism: the primacy of the individual versus the increasing
technological and economic might of the central state.
In Kafka’s Nightmare Emerges: China’s “Social Credit Score” (May 7, 2018). I wrote about Kafka’s vision of a bureaucratic nightmare emerging in China’s “Social Credit Score.”
The idea here is the central state sets up a vast, pervasive surveillance system to monitor all its citizens, and
assigns a social score to each citizen based on his/her compliance with
regulations and social norms as defined by the state.
In Kafka’s nightmarish novels, an opaque, impenetrable and
impersonalized bureaucracy controls the social and economic structures
of everyday life.
China’s system is based on a social score, but one’s social score has
enormous economic consequences: the citizen with a low score can be
denied rights to travel, his/her children can be denied access to
educational opportunities and so on.
As I noted, there doesn’t appear to be a legal process for challenging
one’s low social score, or much transparency on the various violations
and weighting of violations that go into calculating each individual’s
score.
I’ve often written about the difference between force and power: as per Edward Luttwak, force (coercion) is costly and clumsy, while power works via persuasion, grudging or otherwise.
China is attempting to create a system that is extremely coercive (a low
score generates severe punishments) but also seeks to internalize the
social scoring system: no authority figure is required to force
individuals to comply; each individual internalizes the rules and
modifies their own behavior accordingly.
This aligns with China’s historic reliance on internalized social norms to control its vast populace. Even
in the Song Dynasty (960 AD to 1279 AD), the central state relied on
the internalized social norms of Confucian values to “order society”
with minimal coercion. A judiciary system handled gross violations of
the legal rules and petitions for redress, but in effect the state ruled
through the family and community hierarchies created by Confucianism.
I
bring up Kierkegaard in this context as one of the first “modern”
philosophers to question state control of the church and religion (the
Western analog of Confucianism) and propose the primacy of the
individual’s relationship with God and inner moral compass — what he
termed the knight of hidden inwardness.
The primacy of the individual is the core of Modernism, as each
individual discovers the mysteries of God in their own way and time, and
creates their own identity via their own choices and commitments. This
is the essence of Existentialism and Modernism, which rejects the
ultimate authority of centrally controlled norms.
In art and literature, Modernism frees individuals to work outside of
established genres and flout traditional rules governing art and
literature, and indeed, the creative process.
We seem to be heading into a confrontation between the two forces of Modernism: the
primacy of the individual versus the increasing technological and
economic might of the central state. This conflict is largely beneath
the surface of everyday life and the “news,” but it may play a key role
in the coming Great Crisis that’s due by 2025.
As for those who claim to have refuted or even debunked (heh) concerns about the teleology of China’s social control system, let’s paraphrase Zhou Enlai: it’s too early to tell.

One thought on “The Conflicting Forces of Modernism: Kafka and Kierkegaard”

Actually, state control of the Church and of religion was dealt with early on in the US with the separation of church and state. Fucking liberal Jews now spin this to alter its original intent (purpose) and meaning. The Church was to be protected from the State. This was decades before Kierkegaard’s time, but was done by statesmen, not philosophers per se.

Soren Kierkegaard was a Christian existentialist philosopher (unlike the ethnic Jewish atheist existentialists that came later, such as Jean Paul Sartre). Franz Kafka was a Jew.